You don’t have to be a large enterprise to have highly effective content marketing. The key to creating killer content is to focus on Quality Headcount, Strategy & Technology.

Here are five content marketing fundamentals to create killer content:

1. Hire a Content Marketing Lead with Vision

This person manages the content development process. But they need to be able to tell a story. This story must be based on a vision for how to tell a compelling brand narrative. What the brand talks about, what stories it tells, is the fulfillment of that vision. And consistency is key. The Content Lead must ensure that the content integrates smoothly into the social media strategy and that there is balance between content creation, curation and kindling. The goal is to give away some of your IP to attract those that will convert into qualified leads. The head of content should also be heavily involved in SEO, as the content must reflect the SEO strategy or both the SEO and content are worthless.

2. Wrangle Great Content Creators

Now I don’t give a hoot whether these content creators reside in your organization or you are outsourcing, but you need to find great content creators… I don’t call them writers because great content is so diverse; infographics, video, photography, graphics etc… And while you may think that you must use your company’s SMEs (subject matter experts), there are a lot of content creators that can come up to speed very quickly on your industry and key topics – many freelancers do this for a living.

4. Reuse, Repurpose, Rejoice

Ann Handley of Marketing Profs, challenges brands to become “content chop shops” by relentlessly reusing content… Each piece should be used multiple times. How? By taking long content formats – eBooks, whitepapers, manifestos and the like and chopping them down into chunkable bite size pieces. You can use the Table of Contents as a guide for where to lay the content on the chopping block. There are other ways. For instance, taking a blog post, extracting the relevant analytics, data points etc and creating an Infographic that could then be syndicated elsewhere.

5. Deploy Killer Content Marketing Technology

Speeding content to market requires technology. This technology should enable the creation, distribution and optimization of content. It should provide for a clean content workflow — everything from creating content, moving it through an approval workflow to publishing it. And, oh by the way, provide analytics on what’s working, what’s not and how to take your content marketing to the next level. Personally, I like Contently, not only because of their technology but because of their extensive network of 55,000 journalists, videographers, photographers, designers etc. that they draw from to develop your content strategy and help you in developing your content. Kapost, Curata, Percolate (also provides channel marketing support) and Skyword also have quality platforms.

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Chief Marketing Officer at Axioma Inc, also Acting CMO for Adjuvi. Previously CMO of LexisNexis North America, Global Vice President at SAP, where he led SAP’s Social Media Strategy & Total Customer Experience efforts. Named to FierceCMO's Top 15 B2B CMO's to watch and one of the top 100 CMO’s on Twitter, Steve is the founder of AbleBrains, a unique agency which utilizes brain science to deliver digital marketing, social media and content and branding to build and scale businesses.